No Job for a Lady Read Online Free PDF Page A

me. I’m amused because I won, but he might be a sore loser. There is nothing he can do even if he wanted to. I have the tickets. But I look around again anyway, paranoid that he’s about to descend upon me.
    Down at the tail end of the train, a handsome carriage pulls up to a private railcar. A well-dressed man and woman descend from the carriage to board the railcar.
    The man is dressed in a long black-tailed coat, with a top hat and cane; the woman has on a very large floppy black hat filled with lots of black feathers and a light black coat. I squint but still can’t make out their features.
    My interest is immediately roused. Private railcars are the height of luxury, comparable to owning a yacht. That gets me thinking: Could the occupants provide me with interesting materials for a dispatch? They have to be somebodies!
    While I won’t stoop to write boring news about society weddings and teas, we “unwashed plebeians” are all fascinated by the luxurious and often scandalous lives of the very rich, especially their excesses, so I will keep my eyes open. Who knows, the private car could be holding railroad robber baron Jay Gould himself, who put down a southwestern railroad workers’ strike by hiring violent strikebreakers to beat the striking workers into submission. Clever devil that he is, he afterward boasted that he was able to hire half the working class to kill the other half.
    Catching him with a mistress or ruining a secret business deal by making it public would not only make a dandy story and satisfy my sense of justice that he needs more than his nose pinched, it would guarantee my position at the newspaper.
    A porter walks by, pushing a cart filled with luggage, and I stop him. “Excuse me.”
    “Yes, miss?”
    “Do you know who that couple is?”
    He glances to where I am pointing. “No, but they must be people of great wealth and importance. It’s all hush-hush; not even the crew’s been told who they are. That’s a real fancy private railcar they are boarding. Must be awfully nice to have so much money.” He shakes his head and laughs as he moves on.
    The whistle blows and the conductor yells, “All aboard! All aboard! Last call to board!”
    I reach for my carpetbag, when a young man grabs it.
    “Allow me.” He gives me a boyish grin.
    I let out a small cry of surprise. It’s the young cowboy from the saloon, who later stood on the street and watched my window.
    “What are you doing here? Following me?”
    The gunslinger’s grin gets wider. “No, ma’am. Looks like we just have tickets on the same train. Besides, if I followed you, I did it very quickly, because I got here before you.”
    “How do you know you got here before me?”
    “After I bought my ticket, I saw you near the ticket booth, having a dustup with a gent. What was that all about?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Didn’t look like nothing to me.”
    “Looks can be deceiving.”
    I reach to take my bag from him and he swings it behind his back.
    “Excuse me, but that is my bag.”
    “I’m gonna take it aboard for you. Is this all you are taking to Mexico?” He nods back. “My trappings are over there.”
    His gear is a rolled-up bedroll with a prairie coat and leather gloves thrown on it. Next to the bedroll is a saddle with chaps slung over it and a rifle on top of the pile. The leather saddle, like his clothes, is well broken in—which is why, I suppose, cowboys take their saddles with them.
    “I travel a bit lighter than cowboys.”
    “So I see. My name’s Harry, but my friends call me Sundance.” He gives me a sly smile. “You met a couple of them last night. Not that you took much of a fancy to any of us.”
    Uh-huh. I almost ask him why he was spying on me last night, but I hold my tongue because I don’t want to tip him off. If he was spying on me, I want to catch him at it.
    Sundance has a look that shouts “bad boy” to me. It’s his cockiness—the grin that says he’s laughing at you and those